Hi! This is Sunny, I am a graduate student at MIT advised by Professor Peter Shor and Anand Natarajan. My research is in quantum computation, with a focus in quantum error correction. I believe quantum computational power is a fundamental new resource bestowed to us by nature, and quantum error correction is the procedure that refines this raw resource for use in applications. I hope my work contributes to the constructions and later improvements of truly fault-tolerant, large-scale quantum computers in not-too-many decades.
Prior to grad school I was an undergrad at CMU. I worked in graph algorithms with Professor Anupam Gupta and Jason Li, and combinatorics with Professor Boris Bukh and Michael Tait.
New preprints
- A highly flexible, optimizable and scalable architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computers based on QLDPC codes, powered by a new primitive called extractor which can augment any QLDPC memory into a computational block.
Extractors: QLDPC Architecture for Efficient Pauli-Based Computation
- ML decoders can be faster and more accurate than BPOSD for QLDPC codes.
Machine Learning Decoding of Circuit-Level Noise for Bivariate Bicycle Codes - Quantum LDPC code surgery can perform parallel logical Pauli measurements.
Parallel Logical Measurements via Quantum Code Surgery - Punctured quantum Reed-Solomon codes have transversal and addressable CCZ gates. Quantum Codes with Addressable and Transversal Non-Clifford Gates
- Magic state distillation works!
Experimental Demonstration of Logical Magic State Distillation
Talks and Travel
- I will give a talk on Extractors: QLDPC Architecture for Efficient Pauli-Based Computation at the University of Sydney & PsiQuantum joint journal club. I will also present this work at the MIT QI group meeting.
- I will give a talk on Quantum Codes with Addressable and Transversal Non-Clifford Gates at Inria’s QASAR Seminar.
- I gave a talk titled Building a Quantum Computer Beyond the Surface Code in Apr 2025, at the MIT PQI seminar organized by Anand Natarajan.
- In Fall 2024, I helped organize a reading group on Quantum Fault-Tolerance with Rachel Zhang, Adam Wills and Vinod Vaikuntanathan.
- I presented a recent work with IBM on Improved QLDPC Surgery: Logical Measurements and Bridging Codes at the Fault-Tolerant Quantum Technologies Workshop at Benasque, Spain. Here are a few photos of the mountain town of Benasque. I also presented this work at QIP 2025.
- I presented our work on Single-shot decoding of good quantum LDPC codes at TQC 2024 hosted in Okinawa, Japan. Here are some photos of Japan.
- I gave a guest lecture at UCLA titled An Introduction to Quantum LDPC Codes in March 2024, hosted by Professor Jens Palsberg.
- I attended QEC 2023 in Sydney, Australia. Did you know that visitors can pet koalas and (small) kangaroos at the Featherdale Wildlife Park?
- I presented our work with IBM on Quantum Locally Testable Code with Constant Soundness at QIP 2023 in Gent, Belgium. Here are some photos of the beautiful city of Gent. I also presented this work at IBM Yorktown.
- In Summer 2023, I attended the Quantum Summer Cluster Workshop at Simons Institute.
- In Spring 2022, I helped organize a reading group on Asymptotically Good QLDPC Codes with Eugene Tang and Anand Natarajan.
Experiences
- I was a summer intern at QuEra in 2024.
- In Spring 2024, I attended the Quantum Algorithms, Complexity, and Fault Tolerance Workshop, hosted by Simons Institute at UC Berkeley.
- I was a summer intern at IBM Quantum in 2022 and 2023.
- In Fall 2022, I was a TA for Peter Shor’s course on Quantum Computation.
Publications
Quantum
Machine Learning Decoding of Circuit-Level Noise for Bivariate Bicycle Codes, Apr 2025
John Blue, Harshil Avlani, Zhiyang He, Liu Ziyin, Issac Chuang. [arxiv]Extractors: QLDPC Architecture for Efficient Pauli-Based Computation, Mar 2025
Zhiyang He, Alexander Cowtan, Dominic J. Williamson, Theodore J. Yoder.
Talks at MIT and FTQC. [arxiv]Parallel Logical Measurements via Quantum Code Surgery, Mar 2025
Alexander Cowtan, Zhiyang He, Dominic J. Williamson, Theodore J. Yoder.
Talk at FTQC. [arxiv]Quantum Codes with Addressable and Transversal Non-Clifford Gates, Feb 2025
Zhiyang He, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Adam Wills, Rachel Yun Zhang.
Talks at MIT, Coogee 2025, and Asia Pacific QEC.
[arxiv], [Adam’s Talk at APQEC]Experimental Demonstration of Logical Magic State Distillation, Dec 2024
Pedro Sales Rodriguez, John M. Robinson, Paul Niklas Jepsen, Zhiyang He, Casey Duckering, Chen Zhao, Kai-Hsin Wu, , Sheng-Tao Wang, Dolev Bluvstein, Mikhail D. Lukin, Alexander Lukin, Hengyun Zhou, Sergio H. Cantú.
Talks at MIT, Harvard, and APS March Meetings.
[arXiv], [Blog Post by QuEra]Permutation gates in the third level of the Clifford hierarchy, Oct 2024
Zhiyang He, Luke Robitaille, Xinyu Tan.
Talk at MIT. [arXiv], [Poster at QIP]Improved QLDPC Surgery: Logical Measurements and Bridging Codes, July 2024
Andrew Cross, Zhiyang He, Patrick J. Rall, Theodore J. Yoder.
QIP 2025. Talk at FTQT 2024.
Talks at MIT, Harvard, IBM, APS March Meetings, and FTQC.
[arXiv], [Slides at QIP]Single-shot decoding of good quantum LDPC codes, June 2023
Shouzhen Gu, Eugene Tang, Libor Caha, Shin Ho Choe, Zhiyang He, Aleksander Kubica.
QEC 2023, TQC 2024. Communications in Mathematical Physics.
Talk at Advances in Quantum Coding Theory at Simons Institute.
[arXiv], [Shouzhen’s Talk at Simons], [Talk at TQC], [Slides], [CMP]Quantum Locally Testable Code with Constant Soundness, Sep 2022
Andrew Cross, Zhiyang He, Anand Natarajan, Mario Szegedy, Guanyu Zhu.
QIP 2023. Quantum.
Talks at MIT, Tufts, APS March Meetings, and IBM Yorktown.
[arXiv], [Talk at QIP], [Quantum]
Graph Algorithms
Breaking the \(n^k\) Barrier for Minimum \(k\)-cut on Simple Graphs, Nov 2021
Zhiyang He, Jason Li.
STOC 2022. [arXiv], [Talk at STOC], [STOC]Near-linear-time, Optimal Vertex Cut Sparsifier in Directed Acyclic Graphs, Nov 2020
Zhiyang He, Jason Li, Magnus Wahlström.
European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) 2021, Best Paper Award. [arXiv], [ESA]